I am Cornelis Valk and, since 1 October, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at NEO. An honourable title with new responsibilities. In April 2016, I started an internship assignment at NEO on using AHN point clouds to identify trees. In between, there were plenty of other fun things to see and do at NEO, so I was happy to start working as an earth observation and geomatics specialist afterwards. During my studies in Wageningen (MSc Geo-Information Science and MSc Climate Studies), I discovered the interface between geo-information, Remote Sensing and the natural environment as a playground for adults, and a bit of an aptitude for turning insights and ideas into code. NEO certainly didn't slow me down in that. The winding route via Tree base, BGT updating, precision agriculture, machine learning, computer vision has brought me to this place, and I look forward to all the new things coming my way.
Looking far ahead seems impossible in these times and may be naive, but I am going to make an effort to guide NEO through the changing landscape of technology. In the short term, that means automating, step by step, the route to reliable, continuous, semantically rich, explainable, annotated mutation signals linked to the objects you deal with as a customer.